As the world watches nervously, Greece, under pressure from the European Central Bank, takes the serious step of imposing capital controls: Banks are closed, ATM withdrawals are limited and funds cannot be sent out of the country.

Capital controls will be in place at least until July 7 after Sunday’s citizens’ referendum that will ask Greeks if they want to remain in the European Union and accept their creditors’ terms.

Will Bitcoin benefit from the current crisis?

There’s lots of speculation that the rate of adoption of digital currencies may increase more rapidly as a result of the current crisis in Greece.

“The world’s largest Bitcoin exchanges tell CNNMoney they’ve seen a surge of business from Greece.” and

“Ten times as many Greeks are registering to trade bitcoins on the German marketplace Bitcoin.de than usual, according to CEO Oliver Flaskaemper. Bitcoin trades from Greece have shot up 79% from their ten-week average on Bitstamp, the world’s third-largest exchange.”

“(Bitcoin) had been middling around the $235-245 range for several months, and all of the sudden this crisis escalates and you’ve gotten yourself a nice 10-point pop…Greece was likely the only factor behind the digital currency’s upward momentum.”

Daniel Roberts, writing inFortune Magazine, disagrees and makes the case that the small spike in the price of bitcoin would have happened anyway:

“There may be a growing global interest in purchasing bitcoin that is coinciding roughly with the Greek crisis — the currency’s 2013 mega-spike coincided with a similar financial crisis in Cyprus — but the hike this summer began before the situation grew so dire in Greece.”

Eli Dourado, a research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University says:

“I think we are seeing a boomlet in global demand as a hedge against any kind of uncertainty, not just [the uncertainty] in Greece. I think the value of the concept is being affirmed.”

As Bitcoin Magazinereported yesterday, there are indications that some Greeks have been buying up bitcoin for some time now.

For Greece’s European neighbors, particularly in Italy, Spain, Portugal and even France, there is growing anxiety about the effects of Greece defaulting on the euro and the subsequent impact on the value of the euro and their savings.

In the wake of such economic uncertainty, it would seem more likely that Europeans will be looking more closely at digital currencies as an alternative to fiat currency.

Capital Controls for Cyprus – So How Did That Work Out?

In 2013, Cyprus was near bankruptcy and the ECB and IMF had proposed a deal that would see banks in Cyprus lose substantial funds. These caused a run on the banks, and the government subsequently imposed capital controls.

This devastated Cyprus’s economy, and the controls remained in place for almost two years with the last restrictions lifted in April 2015.

In a recent article in Bloomberg Business, Katia Porzecanski says about imposing capital controls: “Unfortunately for Greece, history suggests it hardly ever works.”

“While dozens of countries from Mexico to Iceland and Thailand have imposed such measures since World War I to boost revenue, prop up currencies and hold down interest rates, the International Monetary Fund found that only those few with sound economies and strong institutions succeeded in slowing capital flight.”

Some Bitcoiners weigh in on the crisis

When Andreas Antonopoulos was in Toronto earlier this year he told the audience:

“I often get asked why I don’t recommend Bitcoin as the answer to Greece’s economic problems. I tell them the citizens of Greece should have the choice to use both digital currencies and fiat currency. Bitcoin alone isn’t necessarily the answer but it can be part of the solution.”

If people in Greece want to use bitcoin, they can and will. All these calls for bitcoin as a “solution” for Greece miss the point of bitcoin

Erik Voorhees, CEO of ShapeShift.io, sees a huge opportunity for bitcoin in the current crisis. In a series of tweets yesterday, using ChangeTip, Voorhees gave away $5 in bitcoin to people concerned about the future of the euro.

Traumatic as the current economic crisis is for Greece and Europe, this may be an unprecedented opportunity for bitcoin to “take it to the next level.” As the old saying goes: “When one door closes, another door opens,” and the open door may be a brighter future for digital currencies.

Yesterday, Bitcoin Magazinereported that Greece had closed its banks and imposed capital controls to prevent financial chaos after the breakdown of bailout talks with its international creditors. The decision came at the end of a weekend that brought Greece closer to “Grexit” – the potential exit from the Eurozone and perhaps the European Union (EU) itself – and confronted Europe with a serious crisis.

Today, Jose Pagliery, the author of “Bitcoin – And the Future of Money,” reports on CNN Money that Greeks are rushing to bitcoin. The article includes testimonials from top bitcoin exchanges such as bitcoin.de, Bitcurex, and China-based LakeBTC, stating that they are seeing a surge of business and inquiries from Greece.

This is, according to Pagliery, a pivotal moment.

“Bitcoin was created as an independent, computerized money in 2009 to provide a stark alternative to government-issued currency held at banks,” he says. “This could be its moment to shine.”

The introduction of capital controls is likely to push people, not only wealthy investors but also ordinary people, to the conclusion that governments and banks couldn’t be trusted with their hard-earned savings. They may then start looking for alternative ways to store their savings, out of reach of predatory central banks, and choose bitcoin as the best alternative.

With limited access to their bank account and no legal way to transfer money abroad, the Greeks are likely to experience difficulties in buying bitcoin at the moment. But while it’s late for the Greeks who waited until now to act, other less optimistic Greeks have been buying bitcoin for some time now.

In other countries, especially in neighboring European countries with troubled economies, it seems likely that people will begin to realize that the government can – and will – impose capital control and cut them from access to their savings if the economic situation worsens.

Based on real-time reports collected by The Wall Street Journal, Zero Hedgenotes that the contagious fear of capital controls may already be spreading from Greece to neighboring Italy. Several Italian banks reportedly failed to start trading on Monday as fears over a Greek debt default induced many investors to shed peripheral stocks, including Italian, with banks suffering the most.

Sales orders on Italian stocks, in particular financial stocks, piled up before the market opening. At the start, the sales orders were so numerous that the system couldn’t manage to process them, something that often happens when specific news causes a sell-off on a stock.

Speaking to Italian daily La Stampa, University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales noted that a psychological contagion could spread immediately to Italy, because the Italian economy is not growing. “The question is: Would [Italians] too think to withdraw their money from the banks or not?”

La Stampa also reports that “The Bitcoin fever rises in Greece,” and mentions the recent April Fool’s joke of Greek Finance Minister Varoufakis: “Greece Will Adopt the Bitcoin If Eurogroup Doesn’t Give Us a Deal.” La Stampa describes similar scenarios as “unlikely, but potentially disruptive for Western economic culture.”

Bitnet, a bitcoin payments processor and the developer of the largest payment gateway (CyberSource, acquired by VISA) has entered into a strategic partnership with Computop, a leading payment service provider, to allow global merchants to accept bitcoin on Computop Paygate.

Since its launch, Bitnet has focused its services to provide an enterprise-grade digital commerce platform with security, reliability and scalability standards demanded by global businesses.

Through the Computop and Bitnet partnership, however, the multi-national bitcoin merchant processor is attempting to implement its technologies to allow businesses of any size to accept bitcoin in a simple, safe and secure manner.

Bitnet bitcoin processors will be integrated in Computop Paygate, which will allow merchants to expand their businesses globally without cross-border fees. Furthermore, with offices spread throughout California, Northern Ireland and Singapore, Bitnet will fund its merchants with any local currencies of their choice.

“We recognize that the bitcoin ecosystem is growing throughout the world and are excited to be the first European PSP to partner with Bitnet to enable merchants to accept payments in bitcoin,” said Ralf Gladis, CEO of Computop. “Through this partnership, retailers don’t have to worry about the management of this evolving payment method. They can simply accept bitcoin as payment from customers, and know that the process will be smooth and risk-free for them.”

Computop Paygate, the platform which will support the Bitnet integration, is a Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard-certified platform which offers service providers and merchants with secure and fraud-proof payment processors for international standards. Computop Paygate enables international retailers and merchants to access more than 60 payment methods, which include – MOTO, mobile payment solutions, PoS solutions, e-commerce, etc.

Computop Paygate is also supported by leading e-commerce solutions such as Demandware, hybris, Intershop, Magento, IBM Webspehere and SAP Business ByDesign, which all recommend Paygate as a preferred payment service service for international payment processing. Furthermore, Computop Paygate handles more than $100 million USD worth of transactions annually, and supports more than 3,000 internationally recognizable retailers, such as TSamsung, Fossil and C&A.

With its global support and extraordinarily large user base, Bitnet hopes to see a rapid increase of bitcoin-accepting merchants in Europe in the near future.

“Our partnership with Computop enables us to extend our bitcoin payments processing functionality to merchants globally,” said Akif Khan, chief commercial officer at Bitnet. “We look forward to working with Computop to enable merchants throughout Europe, the U.S. and Asia to accept bitcoin payments from their customers.”

Despite Bitnet’s partnership with one of Europe’s most popular payment processing platforms, it still has to compete against international bitcoin processors that have recently expanded services throughout Europe, including Netherlands-based bitcoin gateway BitPay, American bitcoin service provider Coinbase and bitcoin exchange/merchant platform Coinzone.

BitGo announced today the release of its latest product offering, Verified by BitGo, a product that provides a real-time view of bitcoin assets owned by a company.

Whereas in the past, verification attempts were slow and often had security risk concerns, BitGo hopes that this will be a verification that allows it to publicly share all of its assets. Further, it will be able to cryptographically display that it is in a solvent state.

When dealing with brokerages and wallets, knowing that the provider is solvent can go a long way toward making a decision on using a service. This service will enable end users to analyze what the company’s assets are and compare that to its liabilities, even drilling down to ensure that the user’s own account is included in the total liabilities.

“We’re offering Verified by BitGo to selected partners as part of our unified platform offerings. The first step needed is to use a BitGo wallet for storing the business’ bitcoin,” Ben Davenport, CTO and co-founder of BitGo, said in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine. “It is not yet available for general self-service signup, but we’re interested in working with other Bitcoin businesses to help their security & transparency.”

ChangeTip the First to Use

In the announcement, it was revealed that ChangeTip was the first business that would be using the Verified by BitGo service.

“Building trust is critical to expanding our user base within the Bitcoin community and beyond, and using BitGo to demonstrate our Proof of Reserves goes a long way to achieving it,” said ChangeTip CEO Nick Sullivan.

According to an email exchange with Bitcoin Magazine, Sullivan believes that, “having the Verified by BitGo logo gives users an extra sense of security.”

However, BitGo is opening up its operation to anyone who uses the BitGo platform offerings. As Davenport said in a statement, “Today we are launching our Verified by BitGo service, bringing the era of unverified funds to a close.”

It Could Have Prevented MtGox

MtGox is the perfect example of a business that was operating in an insolvent state for a significant period of time. Users had no idea that the amount of bitcoin they believed existed on the exchange was far more than actually existed.

The team at BitGo believes that if Verified by BitGo had been around when MtGox was operating that its service would have been able to alert users far sooner to the problems at the exchange.

“Yes, we believe it could have,” Davenport said. “Based on the information that’s been made public, we believe MtGox was effectively operating in an insolvent state for a very long period. While a regular audit like this would not have eliminated the possibility of a business going insolvent, it should help detect it far sooner, dramatically reducing the magnitude of the ultimate losses.”

In an internal crisis management document that was leaked, it was revealed that the company had lost 744,408 bitcoin in a theft that had taken place years earlier. Had a service like Verified by BitGo been around, it is feasible that many users would not have continued putting their bitcoin onto the exchange.

“We are already working with several other companies interested in the product, but don’t have specific names to disclose yet,” Davenport told Bitcoin Magazine.

We are pleased to announce that Reinventure Group, an Australian-based VC firm focused on fintech, has made a strategic investment in Coinbase.

One of Reinventure’s primary objectives is to create opportunities between its portfolio companies and Westpac, Reinventure’s largest investor and one of the top 15 largest banks in the world. We plan to work closely with Reinventure and share insights into the use of digital currencies globally.

Coinbase allows users to buy and sell bitcoin in 25 countries and is focused on adding new countries all the time. We look forward to working with Reinventure and bringing bitcoin to new markets around the world.

One of the main benefits of bitcoin is that it allows people to take control of their own wealth. Recent events in Greece have brought attention to this situation as the Greek banks have closed and limited customers to withdrawing 60 Euros per day.

We feel that all Europeans should educate themselves on the benefit of using a global currency that is not controlled by any particular country or company. As part of our effort to make it easy for anyone to buy and sell bitcoin all over the world, we’re pleased to announce that for the next week Coinbase customers buying and selling bitcoin with Euros will have their fees waived.

Note: This offer is available through the end of day on July 5th (11:59 Pacific time). This offers applies to bitcoin bought and sold on Coinbase.com and excludes Coinbase Exchange. Coinbase offers customers the ability to buy and sell bitcoin with Euros in the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Bitcoin Press Release:Just launched Crypto Collider is a new and unique, first-of-its-kind Bitcoin Game played with skill and strategy. The game features a transparent “GameChain” ledger and supports most popular digital currencies including Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Peercoin, NXT, Primecoin, LTC and more. It is fun, innovative and an excellent multi-functional hedging tool / trading platform.

Collider is a peer-to-peer game so fees are generated only as transfer fees when coins are passed between players as a result of game-play. Play occurs with a variety of high-quality industry leading cryptocurrencies which allows players to win, trade and hedge between their different coins as their strategies play out.

The game takes place in a virtual physics world where crypto coins take on a virtual physical presence as they enter the Collider Arena in the precise sequence, location, velocity, angle and spin created by the players using their mouse or touch-screen. Each “coin-throw” has a different amount staked on it. The sum dollar value of that throw determines its in-game “weight” in both the physics calculation (ie. influence on the game objects) and percentage of winnings (when they win).

Users simply deposit some of the coin they would like to hedge OUT of and play with that coin in many little pieces, just not all at once, and keep playing as long as they can while playing only with that coin type. Once it’s all gone, whatever they have won in that time in other coins, is effectively what they have hedged their original deposit into.

The game points they earn playing can also be converted into Collider Coin, a core product of the game that unlocks special features and strategic ability. Collider Coins can be played in-game for strategy but can never be lost and generate a percentage from every game fee for every holder.

How to Play For Profit

Crypto Collider is easy to get started and difficult to master. Player’s winning percentages tend to improve over time with practice and understanding. Ask questions and watch replays frame-by-frame from the beginning to really understand what each player has attempted and who was successful.

Collider Coin’s can be played but never lost, they are a specifically engineered game strategy tool with many unique and invaluable properties. Players can experiment with Collider Coin to find more ways to improve their rate of success. Learning Collider is similar to any skill based game based on the laws of physics and predicting opponents moves. It’s a first-of-its-kind “E-Money-Sport”.

Crypto Collider’s “GameChain” – Innovation Under The Hood

Inspired by Bitcoin, Collider uses open source decentralised client-side physics code as a logarithm to create and confirm all results with complete transparency. Each game creates a chain / record in the resulting ‘GameChain’, which is a permanent public ledger of all game activity with many similarities to a blockchain. The game itself is the visualisation of this data. When replaying and watching a game players are both visually and mathematically confirming its results with other players at the same time all seeing the same precise movements. This creates a dynamic, exciting game with a new higher level of transparency, fairness, opportunity, innovation and entertainment.

Music Video Feed

The innovation continues with a spectacular user-driven background music video feed. Payers can enter the game and press the “Video” and then the “Play To Sync” button and enjoy this simple yet ingenious feature. Sharing, music, culture and entertainment are intertwined into the game experience as players create, watch and comment while playing and watching their favourite music videos in the synchronised background video display (powered by youtube). Players can adjust the video volume, size and visibility and also play their own choice of video (on their machine only) instantly at any time.

News and Market Monitoring

Crypto Collider is also a great tool for monitoring industry news and market data. A news panel aggregates multiple major Bitcoin news feeds and data on all supported coins including price, difficulty, supply and hash rate are quickly accessible via the coin-info panel. Collider provides a sleek gaming experience that also has some pretty powerful market monitoring capability.

Crypto Collider supports the majority of leading cryptocurrencies, and has been quietly refining and innovating with a small team dedicated to creating a good experience; the most fun, fair, innovative, and useful game in Bitcoin. A unique creation with many benefits for crypto traders, competitive gamers and mainstream gamers alike with many plans for the future.

Friday, June 26, marked the 70th Anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Charter in San Francisco. Along with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Gov. Jerry Brown, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and other dignitaries, a cohort of 70 digital leaders were invited to celebrate the historic event. Included among the 70 was BitGive Foundation founder Connie Gallippi and Alyse Killeen of March Capital, both representing the Bitcoin industry.

“It was a true honor and pleasure to be invited to join the United Nations 70th Anniversary Celebration and luncheon for the Top 70 Bay Area Tech Leaders,” Gallippi said. “Attending this event and representing Bitcoin’s philanthropic foundation was truly an inspiring and educational experience.”

After the formal public ceremony at City Hall, which included speeches and the presentation of the Key to the City of San Francisco to the U.N. secretary-general, there was a luncheon followed by a group discussion among the digital leaders.

“Our #UN70 Digital Leader peers generally came from two camps: 1) sophisticated technology innovators and investors, and 2) social impact entrepreneurs and funders,” said Killeen. “What was most exciting was the overlap that existed between these groups. The technologists were highly socially aware, and the social impact leaders were technically savvy. Bitcoin and blockchain further connects the two camps, and, as a result, was a popular topic of discussion.”

Killeen also noted that there was a good deal of diversity among the members. The list of leaders in the consortium included men and women from around the world.

“I met so many top-notch entrepreneurs and tech leaders with a common passion for making a positive social impact,” Gallippi added. “Everyone was very positive and open-minded, and many were curious and inspired by the possibilities for Bitcoin to help drive change on important issues.”

To everyone’s surprise, the secretary-general introduced a special guest at the leaders’ luncheon: Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai. She had asked particularly for the opportunity to speak with the digital leadership group.

“Meeting Malala was the highlight of the event for me,” said Gallippi. “She is such an amazing inspiration.”

She added that Malala spoke “off the cuff” about the potential impact of technology on empowering girls and women in the developing world, but that tech companies must be sensitive to the needs of the people they are trying to reach. The existing infrastructure also needs to be taken into consideration and adequate support must be offered.

Other highlights of the conference included the introduction of The Global Goals initiative which will roll out in September.

This ambitious collection of 17 goals, developed by U.N. representatives from all over the world, include ending extreme poverty, fighting inequalities and tackling climate change.

“It was quite exciting to see the perfect alignment of these Global Goals with the mission of the BitGive Foundation,” said Gallippi. “I look forward to leveraging bitcoin, blockchain technology, and the Bitcoin industry to help reach these universal goals for a better world for all!”

Killeen echoed Gallippi’s enthusiasm after the event: “I’m excited to take the next steps to work with other U.N. Digital Leaders on blockchain-based project ideas born at SF City Hall on the U.N.’s 70th birthday!”

The BitGive Foundation, the first U.S.-registered Bitcoin charity, is currently soliciting donations for its 2nd Anniversary online auction to be held next week. Thus far, the Foundation has collected items and services from individuals and companies alike, including autographed books from Zapchain and Purse, jewelry from Overstock, and getaways from Gem COO Ken Miller and Airbitz CEO Paul Puey, among others. All funds raised through the auction will support the foundation’s work to support various philanthropic efforts on behalf of the Bitcoin community.

Both Gallippi and Killeen will be presenting at the upcoming Inside Bitcoins conference in Chicago on July 10-11th, where the conference will also be hosting a fundraising campaign for BitGive.

For more information about the BitGive Foundation and its charitable mandate, visit http://ift.tt/1aEjhgc.

Revolutionary progress doesn't happen without lots of work and in the case of Bitcoin that requires many different startups building technology. Few have contributed to this as much as Silicon Valley based startup accelerator Boost VC, which has been focusing on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency startups since 2013. Focusing exclusively on Bitcoin for an extended time, they've invested in companies such as Blockcypher, Coinprism, Coinjar, Mirror, Snapcard, Zapchain and many others.

Boost VC Founder Adam Draper joined us to discuss running an accelerator, their investment thesis and why they've chosen to add Virtual / Augmented Reality startups to the program.

NOTE: Applications to join the next tribe of Boost startups can be submitted until Wednesday July 1. If you're interested in applying go here: http://bit.ly/1IG49MQ

Topics covered included:

The qualities they look for in companies (8:50)

What the overarching Boost VC investement thesis is (14:40)

His view on the BitLicense rules and how they affect cryptocurrency startups (38:14)

How regulatory concerns have risen among their startups (41:40)

Why they chose to add Virtual / Augmented Reality to the program (47:50)

On June 27th, 2014, Adam and his core team launched a new Counterparty asset called LTBcoin. On the coin's one-year anniversary, I caught up with Adam for a quick Q&A.

Tuomas: Adam, congrats on the anniversary! What is your overall sentiment about LTBcoin, one year after?

Adam: I'm happy to be at this milestone! Launching LTBcoin last year was a difficult but the right decision because it forced us to build tools and solve problems that were largely hypothetical before the launch of the rewards program. It took time, but now that we've got software solutions to handle most of the early issues we ran into. Things are going to get interesting.

T: What have you learned about the process of creating an asset and then creating an ecosystem around it, from ground up?

A: I learned that creating an asset is the easy part and giving it value is a far more complex problem. Until now we haven't been able to even do simple sales of one token for another, or to be able to redeem a token easily, so now that those tools are becoming available I think we'll see projects that come along in the future having a much easier time getting started.

T: The majority of altcoins and appcoins go through a few "pump and dump" cycles before eventually disappearing altogether. What do you see being the main reason for LTBcoin's persistence?

A: Because there's never been a pump. :-) We've steadfastly refused to interfere with the price of LTBcoin on the market in any way, so when the price has been weak, it's been real weakness because we lacked utility, and now that we're gaining utility in what I hope will be large amounts, I expect to see the price be real when it reflects that new reality.

T: You've mentioned a few times that LTBcoin and its related ecosystem is an experiment. At this point in time, what would you say this experiment has proven so far? Do you think it has been a success?

A: The experiment has shown the difficulties in running and administering a weekly rewards program for thousands of people, and we've built tools as a result to address those issues. Those learnings and our tools have, to my eyes, been very successful, so I conclude the experiment is a success even if it is not finished yet.

T: Was it your decision alone to assign 510 million coins as the total? How did you arrive at that number? Any idea, roughly, how many coins are currently in circulation?

A: We talked about it as a community on the early LTBcoin forums. I wanted 51 million and then we had a long talk about: Is it better for the coin to be plentiful (like dogecoin) or valuable (like bitcoin)? And eventually we decided 510 million would be better than 51 million. The number did not really matter, only that we set it and stick to it.

T: There has been a few tweaks to the proof-of-participation (PoP) model over the past year. Do you see the PoP model working as is, or do you see further tweaking for the future?

A: There will be a rebalancing at some point in the next few months as we roll out a complete overhaul of the letstalkbitcoin.com design and some of our internal tools. Mostly the tweaking was in how podcasts would be handled when we introduced magic words. It is, and will continue to be, rare that we adjust the "proof-of" model, but it will happen when necessary.

T: Thank you, Adam, for taking the time to answer my questions, and tailwinds for another full year!

If you're just starting out with cryptocurrencies and related software or hardware, the Walletgenie may be a bit too much to chew for it to benefit you. You'll need to be running a Bitcoin node, but those of you having some CLI-foo in you, give it a shot. To get a full list of Walletgenie's features, and to give Mark feedback for the project, visit his thread.

I'm going to leave you with two quotes. The first is from our Quotes Garden thread:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. '" George Bernard Shaw

The major credit card companies – American Express, MasterCard and Visa – are exploring uses of Bitcoin and the blockchain technology, International Business Timesreports. They can see the threat from blockchain fintech, and are considering ways to integrate selected aspects into their own operations.

“We are not currently working actively on any bitcoin-based solutions, but we watch the cryptocurrency market closely,” said Andrew Buckley, head of MasterCard products for Europe. “We find them interesting from a technology perspective, but currently don’t see them as a viable solution for mainstream commerce.”

“Our focus is on these hundreds of millions of people with a bit of plastic in their wallets,” he added. “How do we get them into this new digital world? Once we have sorted that out, and the two billion people that haven’t got a card, then we may start worrying about other things.”

Recently, MasterCard replied to the U.K. government call for information with a put-down of bitcoin and other digital currencies. MasterCard claimed that digital currency transaction costs are lower than credit cards only because providers of digital currency services do not bear any compliance costs, and that, while digital currency payments are not faster than the MasterCard network, credit card transactions are intrinsically more secure.

That should be interpreted in view of the recent announcement of MasterCard Send, a personal payments service that enables funds to be sent quickly and securely to consumers domestically and internationally. Barb King, a group head in the MasterCard Payment Systems Integrity Group, described the service to PYMNTS as “a breakthrough platform in the industry.”

“The distributed ledger is really useful for peer-to-peer transfers,” said Neal Sample, president of Enterprise Growth at American Express. “So the work that Amex does, while it could be supported by distributed ledger, goes far beyond peer-to-peer. It involves creating a set of guarantees and a set of services for both consumers and merchants that they wouldn’t get if they were just trying to transact with one another.”

According to Sample, payment is just one of many stages in the commerce cycles, and companies such as American Express provide a complete infrastructure for consumer protection. While bitcoin transactions are intrinsically irreversible, with no consumer protection against fraud, American Express will actively help its customers.

“There are two elements here: the blockchain technology itself, which is very interesting for transactions, then there is bitcoin the currency,” said Jonathan Vaux, executive director of innovation partnerships at Visa Europe. “We are certainly looking at applications involving blockchain. What can you do with this? We know there’s a peer-to-peer transaction network happening, but we don’t see it scaling unless there is trust in the system. Certainly we are looking at it in a lab environment, and as quick way of routing it’s exciting. We have a team in London looking at specific use cases.”

Like American Express and MasterCard, Visa is closely following other aspects of fintech innovation as well. “Visa is facilitating Apple Pay with tokenization, but the card holders won’t know about – I mean it makes them safer but they won’t know about that, and as far as they are concerned it will operate like a contactless transaction,” Vaux said.

Mexican bitcoin exchange Bitso has secured a seed-funding round led by Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency group which was participated in by Mexico-based angel investors.

With the new financing, Bitso plans to expand its team in Mexico and aggressively push its project to use bitcoin for cross-border payments across South America. Since the majority of the population has no access to bank accounts or credit cards, Bitso aims to provide the nation with a cheaper yet robust mobile payment platform by connecting its bitcoin exchange with Transfer.

Transfer is a lightweight banking initiative developed by the Mexican government as a collaboration with Mexican banks and corporations including Banamex, Inbursa, Telcel and Oxxo.

Similar to M-Pesa, the popular mobile payment service launched by Vodafone in Kenya, the joint project of Transfer and Bitso allows users to send pesos using bitcoin to more than 100 million cell phones in Mexico. The receivers can withdraw cash at Banamex or Inbursa ATMs, creating a nationwide network of bitcoin withdrawal locations, thus increasing national bitcoin adoption.

“Whether you are talking about new payments services that help facilitate faster and cheaper money transfers across the world’s most active remittance corridor, or mobile money and microfinance opportunities for Mexico’s underbanked consumers, bitcoin and blockchain technology is poised to transform financial services in Mexico and all of Latin America,” said Silbert. “Bitso is well-positioned to emerge as the region’s leader in bitcoin exchange and payments, and we are thrilled to partner with them to help build a big, important company in this emerging industry.”

Bitso to Emerge as Leading Mexican Bitcoin Exchange

Launched in April 2014, Bitso is one of the most prominent bitcoin exchanges in Mexico, with top-tier security standards and strong focus on regulatory compliance. To compete against Mexico’s leading exchanges like Volabit and meXBT, Bitso recently acquired Unisend Mexico, a bitcoin exchange which operates in both Argentina and Mexico.

“Through Bitso, we have enabled an efficient and low-cost backbone for cross-border transactions,” explained Bitso founder and CEO Pablo Gonzalez. “We believe this will be a powerful rail to streamline international B2B payments, and remittances to the millions of unbanked and underbanked Mexican citizens.”

Founder talks Bitcoin Adoption in Mexico

“The most exciting aspect we are seeing firsthand is all the cross-border payment applications that are just beginning to happen: remittances, B2B payments, etc. Mexico is a hotbed for global payments,” Gonzalez told Bitcoin Magazine. The US-Mexico corridor is the largest in the world with $24 billion USD-a-year flow. International trade and commerce is even larger. $360 billion USD a year, and it is bi-directonal ($761 billion total.) Several partners, including traditional remittance companies, bitcoin remittance startups and cross-border payment businesses, have been running tests and pilot programs for the past few months.”

Gonzalez said that Bitcoin adoption has been growing steadily month-on-month in Mexico, as more businesses have begun to accept bitcoin payments.

“We talk to the regulators on a regular basis,” he said. “It is positive overall. They are very excited about the potential … However, they feel it is premature to regulate,” he said, a view similar “to some of the conclusions taken by the Canadian Senate recently.”